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On our nation's birthday, it is appropriate to honor the five men who did the most to defend our freedom in the last century. The names are easy to remember â€“ they are the five men most loathed by liberals: Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Whittaker Chambers and Ronald Reagan.

McCarthy died censured and despised at 48 years old, his name a malediction. Hoover is maligned for having been a mad spymaster and is lyingly smeared as a cross-dresser â€“ by people who admire cross-dressers. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency in disgrace. Though persecuted in his day, Whittaker Chambers is not hated today only on a technicality: The MTV generation doesn't know who he is. They'd hate him too, but it would take research. By contrast, Ronald Reagan has prevailed over the left's campaign of lies only because the American people do remember him â€“ so far.

Notwithstanding the left's fantastic lies, these men won a 50-year war because of the abiding anti-communism of the American people. These are the heroes of the Cold War, and all have been personally reviled for their trouble.

The left's shameful refusal to admit collaboration with one of the great totalitarian regimes of the last century â€“ like their defense of Bill Clinton â€“ quickly transformed into a vicious slander campaign against those who bore witness against them. Caught absolutely red-handed, liberals started in with their typical bellicose counterattacks. Half a century ago, Louis Budenz, an ex-communist informant, warned investigators that if they dared go after the Communist Party, they would be subjected to savage attacks, never "honest rebuttal." Unless the American people understood that, he said, all was lost.

Absurdly, liberals claim to hate J. Edgar Hoover because of their passion for civil liberties. The left's exquisite concern for civil liberties apparently did not extend to the Japanese. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese for the internment camps, liberals were awed by his genius. The Japanese internment was praised by liberal luminaries such as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. Joseph Rauh, a founder of Americans for Democratic Action â€“ and celebrated foe of "McCarthyism" â€“ supported the internment.

There was one lonely voice in the Roosevelt administration opposed to the Japanese internment â€“ that of J. Edgar Hoover. The American Civil Liberties Union gave J. Edgar Hoover an award for wartime vigilance during World War II. It was only when he turned his award-winning vigilance to Soviet spies that liberals thought Hoover was a beast.

Liberals deemed it appropriate to throw Japanese citizens into internment camps on the basis of no evidence of subversive activity whatsoever. But it was outrageous for the FBI director to spy on high government officials taking their orders from Moscow. As we now know, Hoover didn't need to engage in much surveillance to know who the Soviet agents were â€“ he already knew from decrypted Soviet cables.

Liberals sheltered communists, Hoover was on to them, so they called him a fag. With precisely as much evidence as they had for McCarthy's alleged homosexuality, the left giddily "gay"-baited J. Edgar Hoover. Their sensitivity to homophobia was matched only by their sensitivity to the civil rights of Japanese.

While Hoover was alive, any journalist who could have proved he was "gay" would have won a Pulitzer Prize. But they couldn't get Hoover on a jaywalking charge. Only after he was dead did liberals go hog-wild inventing lurid fantasies about Hoover showing up at Washington cocktail parties in drag (perhaps not recognizing their own Pamela Harriman).

In 2003, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival put on a musical comedy about Hoover's apocryphal homosexuality in "J. Edgar! The Musical," written by Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold. While slandering a dead man with impunity, rich celebrities â€“ in Aspen, Colo., no less â€“ paid tribute to their own dauntless courage. For the second year in a row, the festival celebrated the First Amendment, giving its "Freedom of Speech Award" to millionaire leftist Michael Moore, in an event hosted by Joe Lockhart, former press secretary to a president whose IRS audited people who engaged in free speech against him. The executive director of the festival, Stu Smiley, said the purpose of the festival was "to reacquaint ourselves with people who have sacrificed for their right to express themselves."

Liberals' conception of sacrifice is rather broad, including:

to work for up to three weeks for less than $1 million;

and to not be showered with praise by Veterans of Foreign Wars while burning the American flag.

Americans should thank God that McCarthy, Hoover, Nixon, Chambers and Reagan were men enough to make real sacrifices.

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org, a TownHall.com member group.

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On our nation's birthday, it is appropriate to honor the five men who did the most to defend our freedom in the last century. The names are easy to remember â€“ they are the five men most loathed by liberals: Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Whittaker Chambers and Ronald Reagan.